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Agro-Tech Alone No Panacea for Food Insecurity

Daniela Estrada and Danilo Valladares

PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay, May 27 2010 (IPS) - Providing technology to communities to ensure food security doesn’t work if local traditions and social dynamics are not taken into account, concluded the participants in a forum here at the Fourth Assembly of the Global Environment Facility.

In Petrolina, a town in Brazil’s Northeast region, “they purchased technology packages to produce banana and onion, and they failed because there was no technical assistance or follow-up,” Espedito Rufino de Araújo told IPS. He is the director of the Dom Helder Camara Project, under the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

“They tried to apply methods that came from elsewhere and were unknown to the local people,” said Araújo, referring to a government initiative for the San Francisco and Paraíba valleys, which included collaboration from international organisations.

He said this is a common occurrence. Agricultural technology packages are distributed to communities “to fight the food crisis” and are intended to be sustainable with the environment and local natural resources, but often end in failure.

“For example, in the Northeast of Brazil we have 110 different geo- environmental areas. One can’t distribute the same package to the 110 sites that have different cultures and socio-environmental conditions,” he said in an interview after participating in a panel discussion entitled “Can we feed the world and safeguard the environment?”

The discussion took place as part of the Fourth Assembly of the GEF, which was created in 1991 by the World Bank and is the world’s largest funder of projects to improve the global environment.

Delegates from the 181 GEF member countries and from more than 400 non- governmental organisations gathered May 24-26 in the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este to conduct its fifth round of fund renewal and to determine the priorities for the next four years.

One of the top issues in the Assembly’s various events was precisely the relationship between food security and environmental protection.

The world’s agricultural production must increase 70 percent in order to feed the 9 billion people projected to inhabit the planet by 2050, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). But agriculture relies on limited natural resources and has a heavy impact on ecosystems.

According to the forum, given this context it is essential to develop and disseminate new techniques as well as recuperate traditional methods.

One example cited in the discussion was an innovative irrigation system developed in the Middle East: a network of surface pipeline that can use almost any type of water, whether fresh, salty or contaminated. The British multinational firm Design Technology & Irrigation designed the system in collaboration with IFAD and the government of Jordan, a country that is 75 percent desert.

“Our position is not against technology transfer, but rather one that favours a more participatory relationship. We have to do this with technical assistance, research, follow-up, and a demonstration so that the farmers can incorporate the necessary knowledge,” Araújo said.

José Luis Tuquinga, a “chakarero” (an indigenous agricultural wise man), works on the Runa Kawsay Project in Ecuador to empower indigenous organisations to recuperate their traditional products. Too often, he said, technology transfer is forced upon the communities.

Tuquinga explained that the way of life of the indigenous peoples “is a system linked to the protection of Pachamama (Mother Earth). The use of pesticides and inputs inappropriate for the earth doesn’t work.”

In the project, financed by GEF and carried out by FAO, utilises millennia-old knowledge and methods and locally produced organic fertilisers to bring back traditional foods like oca (a tuber) and quinoa (a high-protein grain).

The project’s national coordinator, Marco Vivar, told IPS that many technical manuals have been drafted in Ecuador, but sometimes they don’t work.

“In a trip I made through more than 200 communities, I didn’t find even one indigenous person using this. So then the question becomes: What are we doing and how?” he said.

In his opinion, technical assistance should be used to complement the work already being done at the local level.

“The idea is to respect local dynamics and complement what is needed in order to improve. It may sound like a basic principle, but it’s complicated to implement,” he said.

The latest increase in GEF funds means greater possibilities for expanding technology transfer, according to Charles Riemenschneider, director of FAO’s investment centre. At the Punta del Este meet, the delegates agreed a 52- percent hike in GEF funds, bringing the total to 4.25 billion dollars available for the next four-year period.

GEF provides resources to developing countries and transition economies for projects related to conservation, climate change, international waters, soil degradation, and persistent organic pollutants.

The GEF Assembly, which wrapped up its sessions on Wednesday, formally agreed to serve as the financial instrument of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, adopted in 1994.